Green Day in
Berkeley, CA
Show Details
Location:
924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, USA
Date:
October 20, 1991
Notes:
Incomplete setlist
Recordings from the show can be found [url=http://www.greendaycommunity.org/topic/86923-19911020-924-gilman-street-berkeley-california-usa/]here[/url]
Eric Yee: "I drove there from San Leandro, the sky was yellow..."
Anthony Lew: "...Cringer dropped off and Fifteen and Nuisance were added."
"As Green Day and Fifteen were leaving 'Paradise' to go play at Gilman, hot embers were falling from the sky. Jeff's adoptive dad's house had caught fire."
Billie Joe Armstrong: "This is a funny bit. Maybe not. The dude on stage next to me is Gabe [Meline]. Gabe and the girl (sorry I don’t know who she is) next to me acted out the lyrics to “Only of You”.. a very sappy song I wrote when I was 16.. They had this little ad lib moment while we played the song.. These are some of my favorite times. We are always down to mess things up and have fun. Life is a mess. Gabe went on to play bass for Tilt and he’s a great journalist too. 1991 I think? This might even be the day of the Oakland fires right before we went to Europe for the first time. I can tell because I’m wearing shorts which is a rare occurrence."
Aaron Rubin: "That was a good show. Weird day with the fire, though. I had been doing a DJ shift at KALX earlier when the fire started, and listeners started calling me on the studio phone to talk about it because it hadn't been picked up by the news yet. I was getting reports about the fire spreading and was repeating what I heard on air. For a while until the news stations started reporting it, I was sort of the only source of information on the air. It was weird because I had no first hand info, only what callers told me. And the info was sketchy enough that I was scared the fire was spreading into Berkeley itself and I was going to get trapped in the KALX basement. But yeah, great show later that day! Sorry for the diversion... I worked at a hotel on Telegraph at the time, and we had a ton of displaced people staying there after the fire. It was pretty intense. I actually don't have too many clear memories of the show itself."
Larry Livermore: "Many people couldn't get to the show because BART and some of the roads through the East Bay hills were shut down. So despite the lineup, Gilman was probably never more than 70 or 80% full. On a normal day, it probably would have been one of the three or four biggest Gilman shows ever. Also, much of the joy of the occasion was lost when you stepped outside and saw the East Bay hills burning. Something like 3,000 homes were destroyed. That morning I got up all excited and was getting ready to go down to Gilman when it suddenly got dark outside, as if a storm were brewing. Which was weird, because it had been hot and sunny, without a cloud in the sky, for days, and the weather was predicted to stay that way, as it often does in September and October in the Bay Area. So I went to the window to see what was going on, and discovered that the sun had been completely blotted out of the sky by smoke billowing off the Oakland hills. From there it only got worse, and very rapidly, because there was a dry wind spreading and feeding the flames. I've never seen a fire move so fast and disastrously, and I hope I never do again. As Aaron said, the show still went on and it was pretty great, but I was kind of surprised anyone at all showed up under the circumstances. P.S.: Although we were on the flyer, the Lookouts didn't end up playing because someone in Kain's family was seriously ill. By that time it had been over a year since we'd played together, and Tre had already joined Green Day, so there's no telling how it would have gone. It would have been nice to have that be our last show, though."
Photos from the Show
Setlist
1. Big Green Monsters (Lookouts cover) (Partial)
2. Paper Lanterns
3. Welcome To Paradise
4. At The Library
5. Only Of You
6. 80
7. 16
8. Don't Leave Me
9. Christie Road
10. I Was There
11. One For The Razorbacks
12. Knowledge
13. Road To Acceptance
